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Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Restricted Thesis: Campus only access
First Advisor
Dr. Miriam McCormick
Abstract
This paper argues that anger is best understood not as a desire for retribution (Nussbaum 2016) nor solely as a desire for recognition (Silva 2021), but more fundamentally as a forceful protest arising from the violation of the subject's vulnerability - an affective refusal to let harm collapse into passive acceptance. Existing accounts define anger by its outward-directed aims: what anger seeks from the offender. I begin instead at the level of felt experience, prior to any articulated demand, and propose that anger at its most basic is a forcefulness that arises from vulnerability rather than in spite of it. On this account, anger functions as a defense of the standing of the vulnerable subject - not a shield against being hurt, but an assertion that one's openness, caring, and trust generate legitimate claims whose violation cannot simply be absorbed. This reframing makes visible a phenomenon I call suppressed anger: the systematic erosion of anger under sustained wronging, which represents not moral progress but a distinctive form of recognitional and agential harm. In response to the objection that exemplary figures demonstrate the dispensability of anger, I propose the criterion of recognitional clarity - whether the subject still sees the wrong as wrong - as the diagnostic line between genuine mastery and suppression under a flattering name.
Recommended Citation
Jiang, Yutong, "Anger as a Defense of Vulnerability" (2026). Honors Theses. 1963.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/1963
Comments
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